Any mention of serfdom in Russian life in general, and in
the Russian countryside in particular, calls forth a protest from our
liberals, especially from those liberals who love to picture themselves as
almost Marxists. What sort of serfdom, they say, is there in
twentieth-century Russia! It is simply nothing but “agitation”....

Nevertheless amazingly clear pictures of serfdom are to be met with in
the contemporary Russian countryside at every step, and only the accursed
inertness of the Russian man in the street, who has “got used to it”,
makes him pass these pictures by indifferently.

Here is one of them that we have borrowed from the official register of
decisions passed by Chernigov Gubernia Zemstvo Assembly for the ten years
1900–09.

“Leaving intact until the present time the
archaic method of main taming rural roads by compulsory service is a dark
stain on our Zemstvo...” writes Mr. Khizhnyakov on this subject
(Russkoye Bogatstvo). “To say nothing of the great injustice of
this being a service performed exclusively by the peasants ... the very way
in which it is done is shameful. After the snow has melted and after
torrential rains, the village elders, usually under a threatening order
from the police sergeant, ‘drive out the people’, as we put it, to mend the
road. The work is done without any sort of organisation, with no levelling
or any technical instructions. I happened to see such work being done with
unusual energy, to the accompaniment of menacing shouts from the police
sergeants and with blows of a whip to urge on the slower
workers. It was at the end of summer, just before the governor was due
to pass that way.... About five hundred men and women with spades were
driven out to work on a stretch of about three versts. On the orders of the
police they dug ditches that were absolutely unnecessary and that later had
to be filled in again.... And our Zemstvo, in the course of its almost
fifty years’ existence, has not only failed to remove this burden from the
peasant population but has even increased it....”

And so the landowners are continuing to increase the old “service”
performed by the peasants. When so instructed by the landowners, the police
and the elders “drive out the people”, compelling hundreds of peasants to
leave the work on their farms and “dig absolutely unnecessary ditches”,
“with out any sort of organisation” and “with blows of a whip to
urge on the slower workers”.

That is where the roots of the power of the Purishkeviches, Markovs
& Co., lie. And how disgustingly hypocritical are our smooth, sedate,
well-intentioned reformist liberal programmes when compared with such
roots!